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I've asked this before to my Latin professors - the answer I usually recieve is that the real Pope was the one who resigned, the other two were not popes but anti-Popes and therefore had no authority. The Council then elected Pope Martin. No conflict there.

Dear lm,

I'm not really sure whose position you are describing here, but it definitely isn't the position of Vatican I.

Vatican I certainly did not say that the pope "in faith and morals cannot err" -- i.e. that the pope is personally infallible in matters of faith and morals -- but rather that "When the Roman Pontiff speaks ex cathedra, that is, when in exercising his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians he defines with his supreme apostolic authority that a doctrine on faith and morals is to be held by the whole Church, through the divine assistance promised him in the person of St. Peter, he enjoys that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer wished to endow his Church in defining a doctrine on faith and morals."

Your statement might, at best, be described as "in the spirit of the council", but personally I don't think it is even that.

That was not known at the time.

The "pedigree" was manufactured after the fact, using theories, not facts, to bolster to claims of the new line of Popes.

Michael, that sinner

It's true that the "real Pope" was in dispute, but I wouldn't say he was "unknown" at the time. That is similar to the claims that some groups make, that the Councils made up "new doctrine" instead of acknowledging already known doctrine - just because the doctrine is in dispute doesn't mean one side wasn't right in its claims..

If the one true Pope was known at the time, there would have been no reason to demand he resign. All three had strong claims for different reasons, and there were no precedents. This was a dangerous maneuvre, it could have resulted in four Popes.

The Council demanded all three resign, only one did. This required the Cardinals and bishops of all three to desert their Popes. And Cardinals named by all three claimants were involved in the election of Martin V.

Later theorists made the claim that only one Pope is possible, and it became necessary to pick one of the three lines as the "lineage" for the sake of demonstrating continuity.

In the end, the solution was one of outside political-military threats of force applied to all three claimants, this was not a spiritual solution.

Michael

Hi,

This is not correct.

It would be equivalent to say that the Council of Nicea made God a Trinity.

That is not the way it happened, was it?

Shalom,
Memo

You are not alone. Although the following except relates to Melkite Catholics specifically, I believe it is an honorable and correct position for any Greek Catholic to hold:
If more Greek Catholics and Latin Catholics would take this stance and refuse to cave-in on the issue, the current Pope could be enboldened enough (I think) to make the declarations he knows in his heart of hearts he must.

Michael

The irony that a council vote was required to decide if the Pope has power completely independent of a council seems readily apparent to me. It's classic chicken and egg. The Pope obviously by the definition had the power all along to define his power himself without the council. Why the contested vote? Why the hard feelings? Why the pressuring of Cardinals if the power was there already? The fact that the same council also said a council cannot depose a Pope (which was done in the past but is now a dogmatic impossibility) is simply further irony in the whole thing. Much like a plebiscite held to elect an absolute monarch who cannot then be removed by his electorate.

The comparison of the powers granted to the Pope at Vatican I as compared to the conciliar definition of the unoriginate Trinity at I Nicaea is one I would not make, and personally something I find rather distasteful.

All this thread tells me is we really are far apart in our conception of the church, and I have frankly been surprised by some of the responses by people who I thought had a different view of the relationship of East/West.

In other news, dog bites man. Oh well.

Andrew

The fact that the Council demanded resignation shows that some believed deposition wasn't possible. The fact that there can only be one real Pope is not a later theory at all - afterall, how can there be multiple true Bishops of Rome?
It seems to me, the reason why there was a demand for resignation is so all sides could 'save face' by this procedure.

To many, the comparison is the same. Some believe the Pope has always had the powers and the Council simply reinstated this - if that is the case (and I am not saying it is) then the comparison is not too distasteful, why should it be?

I don't understand the feeling of offense. If as some Latins believe, the powers of the papacy are inherent from the beginning of the Church and were only enumerated at VCI, then comparing them to the Trinitarian doctrine or anything else is fine. If one believes VCI created a new innovation with no past precedent, then yes I see how it would be odd to compare it to other doctrine.

To me the truth lies somewhere in the gray, the Council enumerated something which the Church has always been at a pendulum with but stated the position with the pendulum in full swung end, VC2 attempts to continue what VCI didn't complete. It is my hope that a future Council will further articulate the authority of the Council.

Saving face in that day and age had nothing to do with it. The Emperor particularly, along with the kings of France and Spain were totally fed up with the situation. These characters were not known to care much about saving anyones face. Their prisons were full and the chopping blocks were busy.

This was a time when an Imperial safe conduct could be used as bait to entrap Jan Hus and burn him to a crisp, and no one at the time appeared to have any shame or remorse over it.

So then, how CAN there be be more than one Pope? The church had always rationalized the existence of more than one Patriarch in Constantiople, Antioch and Jerusalem!

Even today, there are no less than three Catholic Patriarchs in Antioch, and until 1950 there were actually four Catholics sitting on Patriarchal thrones for Antioch. One might think that a cause for embarassment, but no, they go on maintaining a fiction.

There is a lot of telescoping history here. Roman Catholics of the day knew that there should be only one bishop of Roma, but there wasn't. Just as we of today know there should be only one Patriarch of Antioch, but they had no clear idea who that might be. All three had strong and reasonable arguments in their favor and the situation had never come up before. Oddly enough all of the schismatic bodies recognized the validity (if not the licity) of each others sacraments and clergy :rolleyes: and it was because they could do this that a conclusion to the schism was possible (A lesson for us, perhaps?)

The papacy is not a mystical state, it is an office, not a sacrament and not given sacramentally. The church of those days could have put the papacy into any practical order that worked, including recognizing all three simultaneously if necessary. So they fired three Popes and didn't even blink. (This was actually the second time the church fired more than one Pope at a time.)

Some moderns are afraid of all that implies, but it is better to see Truth than explain it away.

Michael

Just to return to the original topic of the thread for a moment (what, the thread has diverged from its topic heaven forfend, such things don't happen here )



Michael,

Actually, one hopes that the time is not far off that one will see an Exarchate erected for our Malankarese brethren in the US and Joseph Mar Thomas, Apostolic Visitator for the Syro-Malankarese in the US and Canada, appointed to it.

I would disagree with my brother, Deacon John, insofar as the two examples he cites represent extraordinary circumstances and are not quite analagous to the considerations Michael raised.

Our Lady of Wisdom is a monument to a decision made by Vladyka George, in the truest spirit of a shepherd, to afford pastoral care to a Byzantine community that existed but was unserved. While the parish members are principally Italo-Greek, the canonical entity is Ruthenian, albeit serving the Liturgy in a different Rescension than that of the hierarchical jurisdiction to which the parish belongs and within which it was established.

Saint Andrew's is a bit closer to what Michael envisions, but also has certain unique aspects attached to it. The temple itself has two roles, that of a Russian Greek-Catholic Parish and, simultaneously, Saint Paul's Melkite Mission, both of which are served by the same presbyter, Father Archimandrite Alexei, a priest of the Eparchy of Newton of the Melkites. Given the intertwined jurisdictional considerations, it made eminent good sense for Cardinal Mahoney to entrust the parish to the spiritual omophor of the Eparch of Newton. Administratively, the Parish (but not the Mission) remains technically subject to the Latin Archdiocese of LA.

In Australia, at least from a practical standpoint (although I'm unclear as to the precise details), the Russian Greek-Catholics are apparently under the spiritual omophor of the Eparchy of Saint Michael's in Sydney of the Melkites.

This idea of ceding pastoral care, at least unofficially, to a hierarch of an Eastern Church of the same Rite is not entirely new. During the lifetime of Richard Cardinal Cushing, of blessed memory, as my brother Three Cents will recollect, Our Lady of Kazan Russian-Greek Catholic Chapel in South Boston, of blessed memory, was effectively under the spiritual omophor of the then Melkite Exarch. Sadly, that was of little help when, subsequent to the Cardinal's repose, a successor Latin hierarch saw fit to suppress the Chapel.

I would also note that the obverse applies in those places where the Latin Church is effectively in the situation of being in the diaspora (lacking a hierarchical presence and a canonical jurisdiction). In Ethiopia, where all canonical jurisdictions are geographically-based and those of the Latins are of the rank of Vicariate or Prefecture, Ethiopian and other Latins resident within the Eparchies of the Ethiopian Catholic Church sui iuris are under the pastoral and canonical care of the Ethiopian Catholic hierarchs. In Eritrea, there are no Latin canonical jurisdictions, only Eparchies of the Ethiopian Catholic Church sui iuris.

In some areas of India, as well, Syro-Malabarese and Syro-Malankarese Eparchies are not, in all cases, overlapped by Latin hierarchical jurisdictions.

None of these instances in which we "have the upper hand", as it were, gives me any great satisfaction vis-a-vis the instances in which our churches are unnecessarily subject to Latin hierarchs, but I feel that they must be acknowledged.

Many years,

Neil

Returning you now to the regularly-scheduled tangential discussion :p

I think that there is a Biblical precedent for this. Remember the time when King Solomon had to make a judgement over which woman was really the true mother of a baby? He said let the baby be cut into two pieces and let each woman have half. The false woman said that was fine with her, but the true mother said let the other woman have the baby rather than killing it. King Solomon knew that the true mother would not want the baby killed and therefore he gave the baby to its true mother.

I think the real Pope resigned in order to save the Church from more scandal and disorder, while the pretenders to the Papal Throne had to be deposed. If you really love something it is better to lose it to save it than to hold onto something that is not really yours like the false mother and the Anti-popes.

I happen to agree with Irish Melkite in his above post, this thread is way off topic. If you want to discuss popes and anti-popes start a seperate thread in the appropriate section. If this thread can not stay on topic, maybe it is time to close it so that another theme can be developed.

I believe the topic is about canon law and how it is applied, so let's stay on topic!

In IC XC,
Father Anthony+
Administrator

The pope in question left it to history to be answered as to who was the "real" pope. And answered it was. Pope John XXIII, a church historian in his own right (rite?) finally determined the answer to that question when he chose the name John XXIII. That puts "paid" to the question of which was the real pope evermore.

Staro